CASTME has instituted a new award called 'The Findel CASTME Protect Our Planet Award' for innovative STEM project which 'focuses on the Sustainable Development Goals such as Climate Change, Responsible Consumption and Clean Water.' The researchers and educators around the world are being encouraged to undertake projects on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD).
According to the UN, its 'Agenda 2030' has 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be achieved in a systematic time-bound manner. The implication for education could be to re-adjust curricula in order to and empower learners through competencies self-reflect on their own actions that impact environment from a local and a global perspective.
As far as STEM education is concerned, it must redefine its knowledge, skills, values and attitudes to create new pedagogy. According to Kerstin Kremer and Deidre Baue [1], science education faces the challenge of the SDGs and ESD in the following three ways:
(1) it plays a dominant role in equipping students with an adequate understanding of the complexity and the causes of global challenges such as climate change, water scarcity, energy transition or biodiversity loss;
(2) it seeks to find new ways to integrate scientific knowledge and skills into real-world situations and elucidate ways to connect knowledge to sustainability-relevant values and attitudes; and
(3) it has to overcome disciplinary boundaries to understanding a problem comprehensively and at the same time provide discipline-specific knowledge and skills to solve the problem.
This means that science teaching curriculum and its transaction practices to empower learners and teachers to contribute to a sustainable future and to evaluate their effectiveness in science education, propose Kremer and Baue.
The foregoing note can work as motivation to try out a few lesson studies at high school level to fulfil the SDGs for education in general and STEM education in particular.
According to the CASTME awards organizers [2], the projects are judged by a panel of experts against the following criteria with the awardees for 2020 to be formally announced at the UK based ASE conference in January in the ensuing year. The criteria being: 1. Increasing STEM awareness in the everyday world; 2.Improving standards of literacy and numeracy; 3. Originality; 4. Creativity and Inventiveness 5. Practical usage; 6.Social relevance; 7. Contribution to society; 8. Positive effects on gender issues; 9.Demonstration of effective project management; 10. Clarity and a high standard of presentation, organisation and structure.
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